Imagined and Experienced: Planned Districts in Late Socialism and Beyond

http://www.lvivcenter.org/en/researchprojects/imagined-and-experienced/Planned Districts in Late Socialism and Beyond

Typical bedroom communities, built in Soviet times are mostly
associated with monotony, grayness, and often with danger, is where many city
inhabitants live. We do not often think of them when we talk or think about the
city: these areas are large white spots, faceless clots of urban fabric. But
this is only at first glance, because in fact these neighborhoods are full of life.
Created in 1960-1980, they lived through decades of change: from the embodiment
of the ideal socialist future and the attempt to finally solve the
"housing problem" to the faceless "other major" cities or
highly desirable residences. Stable and predictable exteriors, they are full of
contradictions. Developers, city officials, architects, churches, businesses,
local communities, ordinary citizens created their vision of space and the
areas connected to its (re)creation.

In these communities a diffusion of once planned features and the
appearance of new, not previously anticipated ones is taking place. In this
study, we seek to answer the question of how assimilation occurs and how
changes in public (streets, squares), semi-public (courtyards, and yards), and
private (apartments) spaces are changed by human practices. We are interested
in the evolution of the image invented by planners to its actual and final
existence and people living in a concrete place, and the relationship between
the architectural environment and social structures. Besides this, the project
aims to identify the particular relationship of planned areas and the city as a
whole (on infrastructure, political, economic, cultural and everyday levels);
content and strength of emotional involvement of people in the urban landscape;
structure, design elements and features imagined within the space. With this
project we develop a scheme for interdisciplinary research of planned
neighborhoods, which would unite the approachs from the field of urban
planning, architecture, anthropology and sociology.

We will examine the evolution of the physical, bodily, symbolic
living space using the example of a number of planned areas in the Ukrainian
cities of Lviv's Sykhiv (start of construction - 1979, actively erected in
1980), Kharkiv's Saltovka (mass building took place in 1970's) and
Dnipro(petro)vska Pobeda (construction began in 1969). Understanding past and
present communities and using local context, we will try to raise some global
issues for the future of planned districts.